According to Fortune, America needs a Digital-AI Land Grant Act modeled after Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 Land Grant Act to prepare for the artificial intelligence revolution. The proposal calls for a federal initiative building a nationwide system of universities and colleges equipped to educate every region for AI. President Donald J. Trump has already taken initial steps by signing an Executive Order establishing a White House Task Force on AI Education and a Presidential AI Challenge. The authors argue piecemeal efforts aren’t enough and that a fragmented approach will leave communities behind. They warn that without decisive action, AI will accelerate wealth concentration and geographic divides. The system would be funded by an education tax on companies profiting from cyberspace, creating a “digital dividend” from internet wealth built on taxpayer-funded research.
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Why this matters now
Here’s the thing – we’ve seen this movie before. The last tech revolution with information and communications technologies created incredible wealth, but it also deepened inequality in pretty dramatic ways. Prosperity clustered in just a few metro areas while rural, industrial, and minority communities got left behind. And honestly, that pattern seems to be repeating itself with AI already.
The comparison to Lincoln’s 1862 move is actually pretty clever. Back then, they used land sales to fund a new higher-education system that could handle the Industrial Revolution. Today, the equivalent “land” is cyberspace – this digital infrastructure that’s generated insane wealth for tech companies. The argument is that since taxpayers funded the research that built the internet, it’s only fair that some of that wealth gets reinvested to prepare people for what’s coming next.
How it would work
Basically, they’re proposing what amounts to an education tax on companies that profit from cyberspace. Think of it like taxes on gambling or alcohol – a sort of sin tax for the digital age. The money would then fund this massive educational infrastructure project connecting research universities with regional and community colleges across the country.
And it’s not just about coding bootcamps or AI ethics seminars. The vision includes everything from training cybersecurity specialists and manufacturing technicians to creating “lighthouse projects” that let regular people – kids, families, seniors – actually experience trustworthy AI. The goal is to build regional AI ecosystems rather than having everything concentrate in Silicon Valley and a couple other tech hubs.
The political reality
Now, let’s be real – getting something like this through Congress would be… challenging, to put it mildly. We’re talking about new taxes on tech companies during a period of intense political polarization. But the authors make a compelling case that the alternative is potentially worse.
Without some kind of coordinated national strategy, we’re basically outsourcing our AI future to market forces and a patchwork of state programs. And if the last few decades have taught us anything, it’s that leaving education and opportunity entirely to the market tends to benefit those who are already winning. The question isn’t whether we can afford to do this – it’s whether we can afford not to.
Lincoln pushed through his land grant system during the Civil War, when you’d think they had bigger immediate concerns. Maybe that’s the lesson here – that preparing for technological transformation can’t wait for perfect conditions. Whether today’s leaders have that same foresight remains to be seen.
